A 1993 horror-comedy film that spawned a franchise. In all six (6!) installments, none of which seem to have any sort of continuity, the titular character is played by WarwickDavis.

In the original Leprechaun, a family moves into a rural house and discovers not only a pot of gold, but the rightful owner. The leprechaun will kill any who touches his gold, but has a weakness to wrought iron and four-leaf clovers (they cancel out his magic). They are finally able to kill it (with fire). Or do they?

In Part 2, there's another evil leprechaun in L.A., who tries to force a woman to be his bride while her boyfriend tries to stop him.

In Part 3, the title creature is awakened in Las Vegas, and sets out to reclaim his gold. A new "rule" was added, that said if you get bitten by a leprechaun, you will turn into one, unless you kill him. Also, each leprechaun has a "lucky" gold piece, that will grant whoever holds it one wish.

Part four is creatively titled Leprechaun 4: In Space, which shamelessly ripped off the tagline from Alien ("In Space, No-One Can Hear You Scream"). In the future, a team of Space Marines are searching for an alien princess, who he intends to make his bride. Apparently, the more gold a leprechaun has, the more powerful his magic is. Combining her wealth with his own will make him the most powerful being in the galaxy!

Eye Scream: Tori pokes leprechaun's right eye out in the first film. Then he gouges up a spare from a corpse.

Fanservice: Some relatively tame fanservice occurs in the original - Tori spends the whole film in short shorts, and a chase scene filmed from The Leprechaun's point of view means we get an extended look at her legs and rear end as she runs.

This series contains examples of the following Tropes:

Affably Evil: The leprechaun seldom kills those that don't steal his gold, insult him, get in his way, or do anything else to anger him. In the first and fifth films he is willing to spare those that return his gold. When he first meets Ozzie in the original film, he offers to shine his shoes for him. In Back 2 Tha Hood, he seems to get along with a stoner who lets him smoke from his bong... until he finds out that the stoner has one of his gold coins.

Faux Affably Evil: The leprechaun goes back and forth between the two. At one point in In The Hood, he acts friendly to someone for a while before tearing their finger off. While he does seem genuinely affable at times, the leprechaun also as a habit of pretending to be nice before attacking his victims. It depends on his mood.

Flanderization: While the original movie's dosed with black humor, comedy really overtakes the horror aspect as the series goes along.

Genre Savvy: A few humans know enough about the folklore of leprechauns to actually use them against him, but often they're not savvy enough to kill him.

Immortality: The Leprechaun does not age, has been trapped for years without food or water and survived, usually shrugs off attacks undamaged or heals quickly, and has been blown to pieces and quickly reformed. Generally, the only ways to kill him are either shoving cast iron into him or shooting him with a four-leaf clover.

Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: Gradually. There's Leprechaun, followed by Leprechaun 2 and Leprechaun 3, then introducing subtitles with Leprechaun 4: In Space, followed by dropping the number for Leprechaun: In The Hood and ending with Leprechaun: Back 2 Da Hood by mimicking 2 Fast 2 Furious's ridiculous title.

Rhymes on a Dime: Leprechaun is fond of rhyming. The fourth movie is the only installment where he doesn't do any.

Self Plagiarism: Director of the first film (and writer of every entry in the series) Mark Jones made Rumpelstiltskin in 1995, which is another horror film with an evil wish granting dwarf. He seems to have thing for mini-monster movies, since he also made one about a Demonic Dummy called Triloquist

Series Continuity Error: The biggest issue is regarding how the Leprechaun is awakened as it changes from movie to movie. His age is also inconsistent.

How he's killed or defeated is different each film. However, surprisingly, the same weapons that work on him in one film normally continue to work in another. Cast iron is among the most often used.

There IS of course the theory that it's not the same Leprechaun in each film and they just all look the same, though.

The second movie states that the leperchaun cannot kill with his treasure. The third film has him killing a man with one of his coins.

Super OCD: The Leprechaun has a strange compulsion to shine any shoes that he sees. Even when he's trying to attack/kill people, he still takes the time to polish shoes.

Thematic Series: There isn't any connecting thread to the movies beyond the leprechaun. They're all their own self contained stories.

Undercrank: Used in the first film to make it seem that leprechaun is going faster.

Origins has the examples of:

Darker and Edgier: The film goes into this direction, as the Leprechaun is a monster that doesn't bother with jokes.

Mythology Gag: Before decapitating the Leprechaun, Sophie says "Fuck you lucky charms", which was also said in the original 1993 film before the Leprechaun was defeated.

In Name Only: Leprechaun Origins shares nothing in common with the original films (including a leprechaun at all, as it's some kind of lizard monster).

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy